When Len Garis started hearing about fires connected to BC Hydro’s controversial smart meter program, he was naturally concerned.

Garis is fire chief for Surrey and an adjunct professor at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University for the Fraser Valley. If the new smart meters were increasing the risk of fires in B.C homes, alarm bells should be ringing.

But rather than dive into the sea of misinformation about smart meters that is floating around the Internet, he and Joseph Clare, a strategic planning analyst for the Surrey Fire Service and an associate professor in the Crime Research Centre at the University of Western Australia, looked at the numbers.

A single fire can have a huge impact. Homes are lost with all of the emotional attachments. Sometimes people die. So fire stories can strongly influence opinion and fan fears, especially among people who were already persuaded that the new meters are a health hazard.

But statistics provide a more reliable window into the impact of smart meters than do anecdotes.

And what Garis and Clare found and reported in a study released Thursday is that there is no significant difference in the number of fires caused by electrical distribution equipment in homes in the year before the installation of smart meters and the two years since BC Hydro started installing them.

Between July 2010 and June 2011 there were seven such fires in all of British Columbia.

In the following year, post-meters, there have been two.

Two. There may have been more since, but this hardly represents an epidemic.

It’s just as likely that some fires have been prevented. During the installation of more than one million smart meters to date, installers have discovered more than 1,000 problems with existing meter bases that were subsequently repaired by Hydro.

Where there has been a measurable impact, which may not be statistically significant since the numbers are so small, but it is interesting, is in the number of fires caused by illegal grow lamps. In the year leading up the installation of smart meters there were five fires in illegal marijuana growing operations. In the year since there have been none.

Fire has only recently popped up on the list of theoretical hazards cited by people who are still protesting against smart meters. Some argue they are an invasion of privacy out of the fear that someone at BC Hydro with nothing better to do will be monitoring their electricity use minute by minute.

They also worry about the harm that will be done by the radio frequency radiation, even though it is far below the levels we already experience from existing sources and a minute fraction of the acceptable limits set by Health Canada.

In a recent interview, Gary Murphy, BC Hydro’s chief project officer for the smart meter installation, said about three per cent of British Columbians, somewhat more than 30,000, have refused the meters so far. Theoretically, they will all have to accept them eventually or learn to live without electricity, but we’ll see how that turns out in an election year.

While I don’t take seriously the health fears based on the studies to date, I do have some sympathy for people who feel like these new meters are being imposed on them with no previous discussion or chance to opt out.

There might have been a higher level of public acceptance if the smart meter program had been subjected to the scrutiny of the B.C. Public Utilities Commission. However, the provincial government told Hydro to go ahead with the $1-billion installation without that review, so we don’t know how it would have been perceived by the independent overseers.

We may be about to find out, though. FortisBC, which has about 115,000 electrical customers in the southern Interior, has applied to the utilities commission for permission to institute a similar smart meter replacement program.

FortisBC has filed a 750-page submission that includes health and safety information that will be reviewed by the commission over the next year.

If the commission had been able to similarly review BC Hydro’s plan, it might have held up installations for a year, but the plan might have been met with a lot less resistance when it was finally rolled out and the government would have fewer political fires to put out now.

McInnes: Evidence-based approach to smart meters a nice change

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